'riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.' Finnegans Wake

Friday, 19 September 2014

Meet the Genetic Wakeans

Genetic criticism is the study, through manuscripts and proofs etc, of the processes of literary creation. It sounds like a dry technical academic discipline. But there's nothing dry or dull about the Genetic Wakeans. Over at the online Genetic Joyce Studies, you'll find the most entertaining and passionate people writing about Finnegans Wake. Many of them have also contributed to this wonderful collection of essays, How Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide.

THE MANUSCRIPTS

Finnegans Wake is the ideal text for genetic criticism. The creation of the book is itself a subject of the Wake, which performs genetic criticism on itself!:

'look at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and
retouched and edgewiped and pudden-padded very like a whale’s egg farced
with pemmican as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion
times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal
reader suffering from an ideal insomnia...' 120.09-14

Joyce preserved every scrap of paper involved in its creation, and you can find them in four major archives. He sent most of his manuscripts and proofs to his patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, who donated them to the British Library.

Joyce's working notebooks and remaining manuscripts and proofs, abandoned in Paris at the outbreak of the war, were rescued by his heroic assistant, Paul Léon. In 1950, the notebooks were acquired by the State University of New York at Buffalo, and so they're known as the 'Buffalo Notebooks.'

At the top right, you can see Joyce inventing his first hundred-letter thunderword, which appears on the book's opening page. He's crossed the entry out, which he would do whenever he used a notebook entry in a manuscript.

The Buffalo and British Museum materials were first made widely available with the 1978 publication of The James Joyce Archive, which gave a big boost to genetic studies.

A third set of manuscripts was acquired by the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, which has been making them available online(though not in the UK, where you'll just see 'This content is not available in your location'). The fourth big archive is in the University of Tulsa, which has the final proofs for the book. These were only recently discovered there. Robert-Jan Henkes and Erik Bindervoet, the Dutch translators of Finnegans Wake, have written a lovely piece describing their excitement at the discovery of the Tulsa proofs (by Luca Crispi, who they describe as 'the Columbus of Joyce studies'):

'- Hey, the 'lost last proofs' have been found! There are 1500 pages of unexplored Finnegans Wake-materials in Tulsa!....the Tulsey Town Treasure Trove has yielded the very very last page proofs of Finnegans Wake, from late 1938 and early 1939, mere months before the novel hit the bookshops with a thunderclap (4 May 1939).
- All right! Right on!- This makes Tulsa the fourth biggest Joyce-repository in the world and in the universe.- What's in it then? Should we go there to see for ourselves? - Of course!'

Bindervoet (left) and Henkes, the best double-act in Wakean genetics

Henkes and Bindervoet went on to visit the Tulsa archive, where they were thrilled to mix their'fingerprints with those of James Joyce, thereby absorbing some molecules from his genepool.'

CORRECTING THE TEXT

'Has anybody had the courage to ask J.how many misprints are in it?'

Joyce passes on the pained reaction of friends and editors to his new work to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 11 November 1925

A central genetic activity is fixing the book's thousands of misprints, and restoring text lost during the complex transmission process. At Genetic Joyce Studies, Dirk van Hulle has listed many of the textual disappearances in the Wake's progress. A telling example is the word 'lost' in the book's last line, which originally read 'A way a lone a lost a last a loved
a long the'

Here
are the excitable Henkes and Bindervoet again, describing how it feels
to a Genetic Wakean to see such mistakes creeping into Joyce's text:

'
Through Joyce's accretive way of writing we could see the book take
shape under his very pen....We saw words busy being born and busy dying. We saw sentences grow from
mere words to more pages. We saw syntaxes swell until, by an unsolicited
intervention from outside, they burst. We saw the precise intention of Joyce go
to waste because of accidental sabotage by typists and printers. Many times we
wanted to cry out: Take care, Joyce! Watch out! Something's going wrong there!
Keep your hands on the wheel, for chrissake! Look in your rear mirror! Over
there! You're losing something! O my God, this can't be really happening! An
entire sentence off the road! An entire paragraph into the gulley! But the car
scribbledehobbled rambling on, through puddles and potholes, rainshowers and
hailstorms of criticism and ignorance, and one after the other essential car
parts fell off to remain behind on the rocky rough country road from Dublin. We saw
cristalclear phrases being ruined and disjointed by an accidental loss of
punctuation marks, letters, words and sometimes whole lines. We saw Joyce make
the most of typographical errors by concocting something new out of the muddle.
We saw how he desperately tried to correct accidental mistakes, but more often
than not we saw how he had to admit defeat and lay down his arms in the face of
the inevitable inky, murky sea of mistakes his typists and printers made, and
by neglecting them, continue them. In short, we were biting our nails in sorrow
and impotent rage, howling at the moon of the inevitable course of history.'

'I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man'

Joyce to George Antheil, 3 January 1931, Letters 1, 297

Finnegans Wake is a patchwork of quotations frombooks and newspapers, which Joyce recorded in the Buffalo notebooks. Genetic Wakeans like to track these down, an activity which can become addictive.

'I locked myself up, I neglected my family, shirked
my duties and generally wasn’t able to think about anything else but finding
new sources. This lasted a full month, before I could tear myself away, little
by little, from the World of Wakecraft, but after two months I still have to
have my daily dose of source hunting. So beware. You may try this at home, but
at your own peril.'

'I spent far too much time ploughing through several months' worth of Irish Times newspapers, reading every single line of every single newspaper. The waste of more than several hundred hours was made up by finding out exactly who Frisky Shorty was (FW. 039.18 et passim; he was a good friend of Boston Slim)'

(Frisky Shorty is one of the gossip-mongers who spreads rumours about HCE. Joyce discovered the name in an article about 'Literary Vagabonds' '
He [the author
W.H. Davies] varied the monopoly of tramping by stealing free rides on freight
trains with kindred knights of the road known as "Boston Slim" and
"Frisky Shorty."")

The Dubliner Vincent Deane is one of the best genetic detectives. I first came across him in 1985, when he began to bring out the Finnegans Wake Circular - the first journal devoted to notebook studies.

ROBBERT-JAN HENKES

Robbert-Jan Henkes is another great source hunter, and he's written a series of witty and playful articles, reconstructing Joyce's reading from his notebooks. He often uses fictional techniques to bring to life Joyce's reading ('With his less bad right eye close to the book, Joyce starts
reading about marriage customs in the region around Tréguier...').

'In March and May 1924, while drafting the first
version of Shaun...Joyce took two short
word-hunting trips to Africa. Until recently, little was known about these
missions, although there were some telltale hintsin Joyce’s travel notebooks.
But now the sources of these travel notes have been discovered. Both African
expeditions were tracing the footprints of the Scottish-born missionary Dan
Crawford (1870-1926).'

Henkes presents this 'word safari', taken by Joyce in Paris, as if it was a real trip to Africa, and even includes this picture, captioned 'Joyce (left) meets Crawford in the long grass (photograph by P.B. Last).'

Henkes also gives us this map, captioned 'James Joyce’s
itineraries in the basin of the Upper Congo, March (blue, from Elisabethville
to Lake Mweru and then to, but not reaching Ilala) and May (red, from Chisamba
to Lake Mweru) 1924'

'As soon as Joyce had invented his Old Men...he
quickly decided he needed to make them as demented as possible, and he started
studying old age and its effects in some depth by delving into serious
medical literature. This literature, in turn, supplied him with ideas of what
the Old Men should actually be doing in their state of dementia.'

Henkes has identified Dr Costanza Pascal's La Démence Précoce (left) as a major source. She was a doctor in a clinic who recorded many of the symptoms of patients suffering from dementia. For example, she writes:'They
don’t get into their beds anymore, sleep on the blanket, under their bed, or
under those of other people.’

This inspired the anarchically demented behaviour, and the shared bed, of the four old men in Joyce's episode:

'when they were in dreams of yore, standing behind the door, or leaning out of the chair, or kneeling under the sofacover and setting on the souptureen, getting into their way something barbarous, changing the one wet underdown convibrational bed or they used to slumper under...'

393.36-394.04.

Another symptom of dementia described is the breakdown of language, as 'syntactical links (‘but’, ‘by’, ‘if’,
etc.) are randomly placed and unite disparate sentences. [...] Nouns,
adjectives, verbs are often the casualties of the language of these patients;
conjunctions, prepositions grow less numerous. [...] Finally, nouns,
adjectives, etc., eventually fade and disappear. Neologisms of dementia, which
represent the last stage of erasing images, are constructed with the remains of
all these elements.'

Henkes shows how Joyce used these ideas in creating the senile style of Mamalujo, deliberately mislaying prepositions and conjunctions. To create 'neologisms of dementia', he went through the text erasing letters, so that, for example, 'beautiful' at top left, became 'beaufu'.

In the same text, Henkes found Dr Costanza criticising another psychologist for presupposing'an ideal
human being with an ideal disease.'

Joyce recorded this in his notebook as ‘ideal man suffering from an
ideal disease’, which Henkes describes as 'an early version of his famous vision of the only possible
public of Finnegans Wake, ‘that ideal reader suffering from an ideal
insomnia,’ (FW 120.13-14) – a motto that can be engraved on the
tombstone of many a genetic Wakean, dead or alive.'

WHY AREN'T THEY CELEBRITIES?

These genetic Wakeans deserve to be more widely known and read! To conclude, here's a quotation from another top geneticist, Jed Deppman:

'In a recurring dream, I wake up and
genetic studies are no longer the sole province of academics. The whole world
has embraced them: there are bestsellers, websites, talk shows, even
professional teams...with mascots, fans, competitions, cheerleaders, and action
figures....But then I wake up, and as Emily Dickinson (the last person I see in
my dream) puts it: "The nearest dream recedes unrealized." Nobody in
my family or college community has ever heard of genetic criticism or shows the
slightest interest, and everyone encourages me politely but curtly to do
something else.'

4 comments:

Re: Henkes' piece on Joyce going to Africa, much as I love the piece and imagining Joyce on these word safaris, I can't help having a nagging suspicion that Henkes is pulling our leg. How did all the Joyce biographers miss such a great anecdote?

Henkes does like pulling our legs, but his research always looks solid to me. The great thing about genetic criticism is that it's falsifiable. We can read Crawford's book, Back to the Long Grass, online: https://archive.org/details/backtothelonggra017315mbp

Henkes makes it clear to the reader that this was a mental rather than a real trip to Africa with the quote from Esseintes at the top: 'A quoi bon bouger quand on peut voyager si magnifiquement sur une chaise?' ('What's the good of moving when you can travel so magnificently in a chair?')

The idea of Joyce in darkest Africa reminds me of an anecdote Hemingway told in a 1952 letter, quoted by Ellmann:

'Once in one of those casual conversations you have when you're drinking, Joyce said to me that he was afraid his writing was too suburban and that maybe he should get around a bit and see the world. Nora Joyce said, 'Ah, Jim could do with a spot of that lion hunting.' Joyce replied, 'The thing we must face is that I couldn't see the lion.' His wife was not to be silenced. 'Hemingway'd describe him to you and afterwards you could go up and touch him and smell of him. That's all you'd need.''